The polling stations had not long been open when Keiko Fujimori reached the cemetery with her younger sister and her teenage daughters. Dressed uniformly in starch white blouses and blue-wash jeans, they proceeded across the lawn, each carrying a sheaf of roses and carnations. The elder women knelt at their mother’s grave and placed the blush pink flowers in a vase. Heads bowed, they lingered a short while. Then, hand in hand, they walked another twenty paces among the headstones. For her father Alberto, who was Peruvian president from 1990 to 2000, Keiko had brought an arrangement in the national colors of red and white. She led the family in prayer before turning to smile at reporters. Later that day, she cast her vote in a presidential election where, at the fourth time of asking, she won the country’s highest office.

Keiko’s visit to her parents’ tombs was a belated response of sorts to Alberto Fujimori’s detractors, who derided a president without any forebears buried in Peruvian soil. Fujimori was merely the son of Japanese migrants when he burst onto the political scene upon his first election in 1990. His surname had no precedent or meaning. Shortly after arriving in Peru in the 1930s, Alberto’s father had adopted a new name. Fujimori translates loosely to “wisteria wood.” It was a fitting choice. He would go on to open a florist business in his adoptive country where Alberto worked as an adolescent, delivering spectacular sculptures on his bicycle to the modernist mansions of Lima. From humble beginnings, Fujimori rose far and fast. Further still he eventually fell, sentenced in 2009 to twenty-five years in prison for human rights abuses and corruption.

Now Fujimori bones lie deep in Andean earth. Even so, Keiko’s lineage surely remains controversial. For two generations, Peruvians have followed the elaborate plotlines of dramatic family feuds, beginning with the spat between her father Alberto and her mother Susana Higuchi, who was also part of the Japanese community. Their widely publicized conflict emerged in 1992, when Higuchi accused her husband’s family of misappropriating charitable donations sent from Japan. Keiko first came to public view during their acrimonious divorce: when she was just nineteen, her father, as president, invited her to replace her mother as First Lady. A successful businesswoman and twice member of Congress, Higuchi would aspire to the presidency herself, though her ambitions were extinguished by a vengeful campaign orchestrated by her ex-husband to block her nomination. She retaliated by claiming that she had been tortured on Fujimori’s orders. The tumultuous relationship between Susana and Keiko has long been a subject of speculation. This squabbling has not played out in their favor. Peru is a conservative nation that places great value on integrity and discretion, especially among the elite and the influential.